Saturday, November 10, 2012

One of the difficulties intentionally engineered into our political system is a byzantine ballot access maze designed to keep third parties either away from the ballot or spending so much money on access that they cannot effectively campaign.

Everybody knows about GOP lawsuits attempting to keep Libertarians off the ballot in places like Pennsylvania and Iowa, but you may not know just how many millions the Libertarian Party spends each election cycle just for the "privilege" of losing elections.

Here's a way to quantify it: on the East Region directors' calls for the Gary Johnson campaign, we didn't find out until late September that all of our states had submitted enough signatures (often tens of thousands) to appear on their respective ballots.

You cannot campaign effectively when you are not sure you will even be on the ballot.

Now, thanks to strong showings by Libertarian candidates in Washington DC, New Mexico, Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, North Carolina, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming, those state join the other 22 states in which the LP already had secured access.

For 2014 and 2016 this represents a savings of about $2 million that we can put into campaigning rather than keeping ourselves viable.